Golden Years

My uncle and I on my wedding day.

It goes without saying that our society is obsessed with youth. As a person who feels 16-24 internally, but is pushing half a century externally, this is constantly drilled into my head. I am not ashamed that I have shelled out good money for creams, masks, and collagen powders to help keep me from looking like an “old lady.” 

So it was a surprise to me that I had ignored the flip side of this obsession with youth: willful disrespect for the aging and dying. I think this became obvious during the pandemic, when we were all forced to sit at home, watch The Tiger King, and face our own mortality. None of us wanted to do that, especially the Tiger King part. 

But the thing about aging and dying is that we’re all going to do it and some of us are going to do the former for longer if we are lucky enough. With my Gen-X pragmatism, it’s hard for me to watch celebrities I grew up with fighting a losing battle against age (I’m looking at you, Madonna).  It’s hard to look at my neck in the mirror some days — OK, most days— but then I remember the thing I loved most about my grandmother was her soft, wrinkly, rose-smelling skin.

And as a member of Gen-X, everyone I know who is my age is dealing with a parent or other family member who is aging poorly and without a plan in place for doing so. 

My father died at 66, and although he had a rough life in some respects, I never had to see him age and lose his faculties. I am extremely grateful for that after watching his younger brother, my Uncle Howard, do exactly that. 

My Uncle Howard, or Pooch, as I called him as a child, was a man to be reckoned with. He had built his own fortune, traveled the world, met presidents, and had a great time doing all of it. 

Like my father, he was a big man, 6’3” or so, and always well turned out. To say he was vain would not be unfair. He cared about his appearance and, later in life, he had the money to have face-lifts, fancy clothes, and personal trainers. 

This is a man who would go on to give me such great sound bytes as “better nouveau riche than no riche at all” and “I wonder what the poor people are doing.” He was a conservative Republican to the core and I loved him to pieces anyway. 

Like all the Wall boys, he was a momma’s boy and, after his first wife left him suddenly, he lived with my grandmother until he was 40. He was the one who wound up driving her on most of her adventures after she was forcefully retired as head RN on the surgical floor of the Rutherford County Hospital. I can’t count the number of times we drove to Gatlinburg or Cades Cove or ate at the Cross-Eyed Cricket. They caught that fish fresh, you know. 

Sometimes when I was visiting him and my grandmother, he would take me to the movies. And just like my father, taking a 5 or 6 year old to the movies involved taking them to whatever he wanted to see. This is how, at a tender age, I saw my first Dirty Harry movie and the first 15 minutes of The Omen II. I still remember him cussing, “Damn it, Suzy,” as he got the rain checks for our tickets because I was scared to death. 

Incidentally, I am convinced that if someone donated a dollar to Unicef for every time  someone in my life has said some variation of “Damn it, Suzy,” (“God damn it, Suzy,” “What the actual fuck, Suzy,” “Suzy, are you fucking shitting me”) there would be no more world hunger. 

Uncle Pooch married his second wife when I was ten. I had never really met a woman like her. Sally  had huge black hair and wore super tight jeans and sky high hot pink stilettos. I thought she was fascinating. My mother thought she was a whore. What she was, was a savvy business woman who needed a man to help legitimize her small real estate company in a southern, rural area where men were men and the donkeys were scared. My uncle filled that role perfectly. 

My uncle would later tell me that he never really felt like he had found where he belonged until he started selling real estate. I have thought about this a lot in my adult life. 40 is an age when people usually figure they have things figured out or maybe they are so tired of having things figured out, they have a midlife crisis and leave everything they’ve ever known behind. My uncle found his footing at 40 and taught me a valuable lesson and that is, fuck what you think. He may have had a shitty first marriage, lived with his mom, and not really been a success until his mid-40s, but the man wound up being able to afford to have his shirts custom made in Italy. He also bought his pillows at Dollar General, because “a pillow is a pillow.” He taught me that what you value is up to you and it really doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, says, or does. 

I didn’t see much of my uncle from the time I was maybe 12 until I was 17. That was when my father was federally indicted and the government seized all of our assets, including our home. We moved from a lovely old home on five acres in a tony suburb of Nashville to one of my uncle’s model homes in Murfreesboro. Right before my senior year of high school. Life was grand. 

By this time, my aunt and uncle had built a thriving real estate business and my uncle was busy developing half of Rutherford County. Not bad for a man who had been born in a farmhouse in Halls Hill, TN. 

I only stayed in Murfreesboro that one year before escaping to college and I wouldn’t really have a meaningful adult relationship with my uncle until my father died suddenly in 2003. My mother had just divorced him a year earlier and he was lost, in every possible sense. I was heartbroken and my uncle called to tell me the news and to come home to him. When I walked in the door, unfamiliar with a lot of my aunt’s family, he pulled me aside and said, “I can never replace your father, but you will always be like a daughter to me and we will always have each other.” I collapsed into him. 

I honestly don’t know what I would have done without him in that year after my father died. In the first few days, he helped me make the funeral arrangements and navigate the whole nightmare that is our culture’s death rituals. He reminded me who people were and introduced me to people who I would need in the coming weeks. I began to understand that he was an important man in the community, Howard Wall, and not just my Uncle Pooch. 

During the course of the months that would follow, I would spend a lot of late nights with my uncle, reliving years of my life and telling him how I had experienced them, versus what he had seen and heard. The two versions didn’t always line up and I learned a lot about my parents and their relationship that I had never known. Together we put a lot of pieces together and helped each other understand our lives better. Those were good nights.

I had met my husband shortly before my father’s death (the only man my father ever let drive him in his car) and once the dust and lawsuits were settled, we decided to get married. I say decided, because that’s exactly what we did. There was no grand proposal, no, “Will he or won’t he.” We both knew that was the next step in our relationship and I knew I wanted my uncle to give me away. On the day of the wedding, as we waited for our cue to do our thing, we got to talking and laughing and, apparently, missed our cue, and made everyone nervous as they started “Here Comes the Bride” for the second time. Oops.

Other than my brothers, who were far flung and sometimes not reliable, my uncle was the only close blood relation I had left, having never been close to anyone on my mother’s side. I valued his opinion and relied on him for advice. When I got sued for the first time, I called him, and without skipping a beat, he said, “You’re not really doing business until you get sued, ain’t that right, Sally?”

My husband and I visited my aunt and uncle regularly until my aunt’s dementia started becoming harder and harder to handle. My uncle didn’t like people to see her “like that”, so he and I would drive and meet halfway between Knoxville and Murfreesboro for lunch. These were good times, as I was now thriving in my real estate career and had a great sounding board in my uncle to talk about business planning and future endeavors. Every time we would part ways to go home, one of us would always tell the other one, “I’m always here for you. We Walls have to stick together!”

These meetings slowly stopped happening three or so years before the pandemic, as my aunt’s condition worsened. I didn’t realize how bad things had become until my husband and I went to visit after seeing a show at the Ryman in Nashville. Having gotten stuck in traffic on the way from Nashville to Murfreesboro, we didn’t get to their house until 2am. The plan was to spend the night and have breakfast with them in the morning before driving home. Because it was so late, we crept into the house as quietly as possible, only to find that they were in full sun-downing mode. Every light in the house was on, a western was blaring from the TV, my uncle was smoking, and he immediately greeted me as though it were the middle of the day and asked if I’d like a cup of coffee. I saw that my aunt, who had always been so put together and vain, had let her hair go gray, was in sweats, and had her teeth out. And here I didn’t even know she had dentures. She was clearly wearing a diaper under her sweatpants and was lounging on a pee pad, which by the smell of it, needed changing. 

I had no experience with this “sun-downing” before and was gobsmacked. They were ready to party and we were about to fall asleep on our feet. It took us a good hour and a half to say our hellos and good nights and finally get to bed. 

I had known my aunt was in a bad way, but I had no idea my uncle was declining as well. I was concerned, but I didn’t know what to do, and with my own business to run, I didn’t worry too much about him. He was, after all, a force to be reckoned with, right?

I called my uncle regularly and at some point I called and through a muddled conversation, I realized he had recently been hospitalized. This was concerning and also enraging. The only family close to him in Murfreesboro was his wife’s family and they hadn’t seen a need to contact me. In fact, I wound up calling his lifelong secretary to find out what the hell was going on. More money, more problems, y’all. 

Something else no one tells you about aging is that when older people get urinary tract infections, they can go batshit crazy. I’m not sure why learning about things like this and sun-downing aren’t as important as learning about how babies are made, but again, we don’t put a whole lot of value on aging and the elderly as a society. You show up on the earth and then you disappear, real mysterious like. 

This is all to say that when I showed up at the hospital, my uncle was less than thrilled to see me and wasn’t quite sure what was going on. Part of this was his pride, I realize, but part of it was UTI induced dementia. I stayed for about 10 minutes and drove home. 

I found myself in uncharted waters. I had never gone through the process of losing someone in stages, especially someone who lived 3 hours away.  

2020 was obviously a rough year, especially for anyone who had loved ones who didn’t believe in the pandemic. My uncle was one of these people and didn’t understand why I wouldn’t come visit. I’m ashamed to admit that during the ensuing feces festival that was that fall and winter, I neglected to call him, mostly because a part of me didn’t want to have to talk about the “-tions'' that were going on in the country: vaccinations, elections, insurrections. Today I know you call anyway. You put that shit on a shelf or in a cupboard and you fucking call because elected officials are not what reallly matter in our lives. The people we love, even when they have crazy beliefs -- like super batshit crazy beliefs -- are what matter. 

So it was that I called my uncle in Spring of 2021 and he didn’t know who I was. This was like a punch to the solar plexus. I told him I was coming to see him and got off the phone. 

Things were pretty bad, but not horrible. He  was making sense about half of the time, but a lot of what he talked about wasn’t real. He was insistent that he was building another phase of a subdivision (he wasn’t) and talking about how he was going to drive out to check the builder’s progress (his car had been sold). We sat in that back bedroom, the heat cranked to 78 in late April, the gas logs going, and my uncle chain smoking and drinking one Diet Coke after another. He once again pulled me aside and told me he didn’t trust the people around him, but he trusted me. I don’t know if this was because of dementia, the fact they weren’t blood kin, or both. He said, “We’re Walls, Suzy! We have to take care of each other!” I told him he could always count on me. 

On the way home from that visit, he called to tell me to drive safe and that he was so glad that my father and I had come to see him. My father had been dead nearly 18 years by this time. 

About three weeks later, I would find out that my uncle had been admitted to the hospital the day after Memorial Day and had been there for 6 days without me knowing. It turns out his wife’s family hadn’t wanted to deal with him not wanting to be admitted to the hospital, so a combination of a UTI, edema, and dehydration had left him in rough shape. 

That night I seethed over my aunt’s family’s treatment of him, but I think I was really mad at myself for not being there to take care of him. He had no Wall relatives nearby to help, and seemingly very few friends to step in. This greatly concerned me. 

I drove down the next morning to see him. He sat there in bed, in a hospital gown and socks, a diaper obviously sticking out of his gown. This was a far cry from the man in the bespoke suit and french cuff shirts who had helped me whip bankers and bad guys into shape after my father died. The times I had been to see him in the hospital before, he had not wanted me to see him in a feeble condition and had cut our visits short. This time he wanted me to stay. 

His nails hadn’t been cut in a long time and he couldn’t stand it. I went to the drugstore and bought some clippers and cut them for him because he was shaking too badly to do it himself.  The only other person I have ever done this for is my husband. I bought a big bag of peanut M & M’s with the clippers.  As soon as I gave him the candy, two nurse techs entered the room and he held the bag up to them and said, “Maybe NOW y’all will show me some respect.” I laughed. My uncle was still in there. 

The Delta surge hit and I pressed pause on traveling to see him, worried that I would get him and my unvaccinated aunt sick. We talked on the phone over the next several months, with our conversations becoming more and more confusing on his end, until he finally started leaving incoherent voicemail messages at my office that scared my admin. I decided Delta or no Delta, it was time to go visit again. 

Things were a lot worse than the last time I had been there. My aunt was the same, in a hospital bed, curled up in a ball like a baby, hair sticking up everywhere and her dentures not in. She was mostly blind and completely immobile but her mind was still sharp. But that part wasn’t shocking. What was shocking was that my uncle, who had formerly been wearing normal clothes and sitting in a recliner, was now in a hospital gown and also in a hospital bed next to his wife. He was gaunt and gray with no energy to speak of. 

He knew who I was, but not much else. When he asked me, his real estate agent niece, how many students I had, I told him five. I hadn’t been a teacher in twenty years, but I didn’t see a need to argue the point. He was having trouble using his hands and this meant the TV, which he usually switched back and forth from western movies to Fox News, was now permanently parked on Fox. So fair, so balanced. 

It was midday and time for their lunch, so I offered to go to Sonic. Here’s a fun fact: although my aunt and uncle made millions of dollars in the real estate market, all they ever really wanted to eat was Hardee’s and Sonic. This once led my aunt to order a cheeseburger at Tavern on the Green, an act over which she loudly protested too much. Whatever, I’m sure it was a fantastic burger. 

Their home health nurse said they were too picky and would never eat anything, but when I asked my uncle if he wanted a shake, he immediately said “Yes” and “chocolate.” I got food and we all ate, my uncle drinking his whole milkshake.

Just as I was running out of things to say and patience for the constant barrage of panic on Fox News (Halloween: Canceled! Thanksgiving: Canceled! Christmas: Totally fucking canceled! Biden to blame for everything!), I realized my uncle was trying to put lotion on his arms. He couldn’t hold the bottle or work the pump, so I asked if I could help him. For once in his stubborn life, he easily submitted. 

I rubbed lotion on his dry, bruised, and liver spotted hands and arms while he made noises like a small baby. I asked him how his feet were and he said really wanted a pair of new socks, so I asked the home health person where they were. 

“I don’t know,” she said, not looking up from her phone. How the hell would she not know? I soon found out when, after finding a pair of socks, I took his current ones off. The smell alone almost knocked me over, but the blizzard of dead skin that flurried out around his feet was atrocious. It didn’t seem anyone had washed his feet or changed his socks in quite a while. 

It was also apparent that no one had cut his toenails since I had in the hospital. I get that home health can’t do that, but his family can, and so I did. I found the same clippers I had bought and after cleaning his feet and rubbing lotion on them (eliciting more happy baby noises), I went to work on those claws. 

I’m not lying when I say I was sweating by the time I was done half an hour later. The man has serious hobbit toes to start with, but the nails hadn’t been cut in easily six months. As I gave his feet one last massage with that Gold Bond medicated lotion, and my uncle once again began to coo, I realized that he probably hadn’t experienced any real human touch in a year or more. I let that sink in and worked on his hands some more, grateful that he was letting me do this for him. 

As I was leaving, I hugged my uncle and he said, “Donald Trump was the best president we ever had, wasn’t he, Sissy?” I agreed that he was, because, hell, it just didn’t matter. All that mattered was I was losing someone I loved in a horrible way. 

Between work, an illness, and life in general, it took me another month to visit. It had only been a month, but my uncle’s  decline was marked. He was no longer able to feed himself and he couldn’t move in his bed at all. When I walked in the room, he reached for me like a desperate toddler. I went to him and he held me as tight as he could. 

My uncle didn’t say much on this visit and what he did say was whispered and indecipherable. As I sat with him, once again putting lotion on his hands and feet, I thought about the man he had been, the power he had had, none of which seemed to be helping him now.. I thought of all of the things he had worried about in his life, all the things that it turned out never really mattered. I thought about mortality and love and loss. 

As I got ready to leave that day, he reached for me and begged,  “You could stay. It would be so simple for you to stay.”  My heart, breaking, I kissed the top of his head and again, like a child, he pointed to his lips for a kiss. I gave him a kiss and a hug and by the time I pulled away he was sound asleep. I cried the whole way home.

I had every intention of visiting him the week of Christmas, but on the Tuesday before, I couldn’t make myself go. When I had gotten home from the last trip, I was wrung out emotionally and my body felt like I had run a marathon. I had charlie horses and tight hamstrings. I don’t know if  I gave him everything I had or if I took as much pain from him as I could, but it was rough. So when I got a text from his wife’s daughter on Thursday that the hospice said it didn’t look like he had long, I was wrecked. 

I yelled out loud, “WHO TEXTS SOMEONE SOMETHING LIKE THAT?” to no one in particular. My aunt’s daughter, apparently.  After trying to get my head straight, I finally got dressed and told her I was heading down. She texted back that she had “walking pneumonia” but that it “wasn’t contagious”. In this, the end of our sophomore year of Our Pandemic, I didn’t even think to suspect that she had Covid. It was only later when I googled the symptoms that I realized. Some people are too busy trying to make America great again to have any fucking common sense, I suppose. 

As it turned out, I didn’t need to worry about it, as she texted me again about an hour later to tell me he had passed. I was only barely out of town. I pulled off the interstate , not sure what to do. There was no point in driving down, but I wasn’t sure if I could drive at all. I had lost the last real Wall that I loved like a father. 

I parked somewhere and called my husband, one of my two Wall family cousins, and my uncle’s lawyer. Those were the only people I could think of to call. Those were the only people left. 

I cried a lot and then I did what I always do in times of crisis: I got real hungry. I had seen a little burger place on my right as I was looking for somewhere to park and that’s where I went. Handee Burger, it turns out, is like a mom and pop Krystal, but with the addition of mashed potatoes and gravy. This was what my feelings tasted like that afternoon. 

There was no Christmas that I recognized. I found out when and where the service was going to be on Facebook, which, it turns out, is actually worse than finding out via text. Not knowing what else to do, I did the other thing I tend to do in times of crisis: I sewed. I sewed a black jumpsuit to wear to the service that I christened my griefsuit. It kept me busy for four days. On the fifth day I was a wreck again. 

The day of the funeral, my husband and I decided it would be better if he stayed at home. It was a three hour drive and my plan was to get in and get out with no hands thrown. Leaving him behind was the best way to ensure this happened. As luck would have it, it rained the kind of rain that makes semi trucks pull over on the interstate that day. Sheets of rain came down, making it hard to see and harder to drive. I listened to a podcast about Reagan and soldiered on. 

It wasn’t until I got to the funeral home that I felt completely alone. I barely recognized my remaining family members. They were all old. I guess I was too. In total, there were five Walls at the service and my aunt’s daughter made us sit on the opposite side of her mother’s family. We had plenty of room. 

This was a far cry from my father’s service, with so many friendly faces around and so much laughter before and after. I looked around the chapel at all of the people I didn’t know, while the preacher somehow compared building homes to saving souls. I tried to pay attention but all I could think about was how few people were there who really knew my uncle, myself included. 

On the way to my car, I stopped to talk to a few people, but couldn’t speak correctly and couldn’t process who was who. I was tired and I was hungry and I was terribly sad. I walked in the rain to my car and sat in line to drive to the cemetery. 

The drive was long and I thought a few times about just pulling out of line, getting something to eat, and going home. But I had come this far and I felt like I needed to see this thing all the way through. I was last in line and by the time I got to the country church my great grandfather had built, there was hardly anywhere to park. I got my umbrella and walked through the gray light of the late afternoon to tents that had been set up by my uncle’s gravesite. The main tent was filled with my aunt’s family, so I sat off to the side by myself. 

This cemetery means a lot to my family, especially to my father and uncles. Three generations of Walls and their relatives are buried there , my father next to his mother, next to her husband, next to his father. The hope was always that I would one day be laid to rest next to them too. It’s a nice thought, but I have never wanted to be buried. 

As I sat there with the bones of my family underneath my cold, wet feet, my uncle about to join them, I broke down.  I felt like I had lost the last of my real family, which wasn’t rational, but emotions rarely are. I  wept for everything I had lost, for everything they had ever lost, and for the fact that we are born to love and to grieve at all. I ugly cried and with no tissues, I blew my nose on the sleeve of my new jumpsuit. 

The burial was brief and I made my short goodbyes and left as fast as I could. As I walked to my car in the cold rain, I realized I was done, with that place, with those people who were not my kin, with that time of my life. My family’s bones might be there, but their souls weren’t and I never needed to go back. 

It was only a few weeks later that I realized one of the things that had made me so sad at my uncle’s funeral and service. Despite there being so many people there, I hadn’t felt a lot of true warmth or love. And if I hadn’t felt it in his death, I was afraid he hadn’t felt it in his life. This made me profoundly sad for him. 

My father’s death all those years ago had hit him especially hard. They were different in so many ways, but they were kin, and that mattered a lot to them. They always had each other’s backs and their love for each other defied politics and money. I think he lost that feeling of safety and belonging when he lost my father. I know I did. 

We all talk about the miracle of birth, but death gets no such appreciation. Nothing about death is beautiful or dignified or graceful. There is relief at the end and I think that’s about it. 

While sudden death is heart wrenching, this prolonged death I had witnessed seemed so much worse, especially since it was something that could have been easily planned for. But we don’t like to think that we will become incapacitated, I don’t thnk. We simply don’t take our own and our loved one’s twilight years into consideration until we are scrambling for answers and solutions. We wait until we can’t avoid the truth any longer.

It has taken me almost 20 years to realize that my uncle gave me the push and the confidence I needed to be a self-sufficient adult. He forced me, or rather gently guided me, to be financially independent, something my father could never do. He also showed me unconditional love, something my mother could never do. With this combination of love and belief, I was able to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and go do it. I realized I did want to be a real estate agent, or at least that I wouldn’t hate it, and he believed I would be good at it. He was right. 

It’s not that my parents never praised me or believed in my ability to do things: I had earned a Masters degree and lived abroad by myself and I know they were proud of me. It’s that they never really let me go, my mother emotionally and my father financially. 

And maybe I couldn’t fully disconnect from them while my father was alive. Maybe learning how to take care of myself was easier to do with the genetic distance of an uncle rather than a parent. The why doesn’t really matter, in the end. What matters is that he helped me more than I can explain to him now and I’m so grateful for that. 

I wish I could have been a better niece to him in his final years. I wish someone had taught me how. I did the best I could and I’m grateful for every time I got to see him, no matter how weird things got, or who I had to say was the best president of all time. 

In the years after my father died, my uncle told me he often saw him, once, memorably, at a football game. He swore he was just standing there in front of him, occasionally looking back and smiling. He said it comforted him. When I get sad about losing my uncle, my husband reminds me that, if there is any grace in the universe, he will soon be reunited with his mother, father, brother, and my cat Lester. He never knew Lester, but I like to think Lester would be his buddy. This thought makes me  simultaneously happy, jealous, sad, and angry. What benevolent god would put us on the planet with the knowledge that we would someday die and then let us love each other so fiercely? I hope it is a god who, even though he allows us to suffer the indignities of growing old,  reunites us with the people we loved here, even briefly, when we return from where we came.